Million Year Coral Corral

     Today we visited WindlyKey Fossil Reef Geological State Park, and observed some of the many attractive displays the park had. I was mainly focused on the fossilized corrals in the sediment layers that have hardened over time. Many corrals incorporate a mineral called calcium carbonate into their skeletons for strength, which makes it a lot easier for these animals to be fossilized. Yeah corrals are animals, many filter feed and they can incorporate small algae into their bodies. The algae get shelter when they live in the coral and the coral receives excess products that the algae make while being hosted in the coral. After millions of years, they are covered in layers of sand and other sediments like limestone. This limestone hardens and the coral’s skeletons are shown in the rocks as fossils. 

This site has an old quarry of limestone filled to the brim with fossils of corals. It supplied gravel for building up inlands so train tracks could be placed down. It also supplied decorative limestone slabs for the sides of buildings or other decorative projects. I would love a countertop with polished fossils in it, but I think it would be a bit out of my price range as a University Student. Many of the corals present in the quarry were knobby star corrals or brain corals, brain corals look like brains on the sea floor but the knobby star looks like someone drew a star around its mouth. Both grow in big patches that take hundreds of years to create, their life cycle is a lot slower than ours. Are they slow growers or are we just fast? If you’d like to learn some cool facts about marine fossils click

here.

    Now that the quarry is not in use there is a chance for plants to creep in and start growing like in old parking lots. In some sections of the park you can see roots of trees crawling over and around coral fossils. Covering the old with the new, many of the trees rely on grasping the rocks and using them as anchors for their own growth. It is pretty hard to grow with almost no soil.